Leave it to a researcher who studies icy moons in the outer solar system to come up with an out-there scheme to restore vanishing sea ice in the Arctic.

Ice is a good insulator, says Steven Desch, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe. That’s why moons such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, among others, may be able to maintain liquid oceans beneath their thick icy surfaces. On Earth, sea ice is much thinner, but the physics is the same. Ice grows on the bottom surface of floating floes. As the water freezes, it releases heat that must make its way up through the ice before escaping into the air. The thicker the ice, the more heat gets trapped, which slows down ice formation. That’s bad news for the Arctic, where ice helps keep the planet cool but global warming is causing ice to melt faster than it can be replaced.

The answer to making thicker ice more quickly? Suck up near-freezing water from under the ice and pump it directly onto the ice’s surface during the long polar winter. There, the water would freeze more quickly than underneath the ice, where it usually forms.

In theory, Desch says, the pumps used for this top-down approach to ice growth could be driven by technology no more sophisticated than the windmills that have long provided water to farms and ranches on the Great Plains.

Now is the time to begin detailed designs and build prototypes, Desch says. The Arctic Ocean’s end-of-summer sea ice coverage has decreased, on average, more than 13 percent per decade since 1979. “There’ll be a time, 10 to 15 years from now, when Arctic sea ice will be accelerating to oblivion, and there’ll be political will to do something about climate change,” Desch says. “We need to have this figured out by the time people are ready to do something.”

Professor Desch and his colleagues estimate that each ice-making buoy would cost $50,000 (including shipping and handling). They estimate that it would cost $500 billion to cover 10% of the Arctic Ocean with ice-making buoys…

Ice grows on the bottom surface of floating floes. As the water freezes, it releases heat that must make its way up through the ice before escaping into the air. The thicker the ice, the more heat gets trapped, which slows down ice formation. That’s bad news for the Arctic, where ice helps keep the planet cool but global warming is causing ice to melt faster than it can be replaced.

“There’ll be a time, 10 to 15 years from now, when Arctic sea ice will be accelerating to oblivion, and there’ll be political will to do something about climate change. We need to have this figured out by the time people are ready to do something.”

Since we know that the current Arctic sea ice extent is much larger than that of most of the Holocene, “oblivion” is probably not the place to which Arctic sea ice is heading. If anything, it is returning to normal. So, I don’t think these ice-making buoys would be the best place to “invest” $500 billion.

The Arctic was probably ice-free during summer for most of the Holocene up until about 1,000 years ago. McKay et al., 2008 demonstrated that the modern Arctic sea ice cover is anomalously high and the Arctic summer sea surface temperature is anomalously low relative to the rest of the Holocene.

Figure 1. “Modern sea-ice cover in the study area, expressed here as the number of months/year with >50% coverage, averages 10.6 ±1.2 months/year… Present day SST and SSS in August are 1.1 ± 2.4 8C and 28.5 ±1.3, respectively… In the Holocene record of core HLY0501-05, sea-ice cover has ranged between 5.5 and 9 months/year, summer SSS has varied between 22 and 30, and summer SST has ranged from 3 to 7.5 8C (Fig. 7). (McKay et al., 2008)

Stranne et al., 2013 demonstrated that the modern day Arctic sea ice extent is more comparable to that of the last Pleistocene glacial stage than to that of the Holocene Climatic Optimum (9,000-5,000 years before present).

If trapping the Warm Water beneth the ice causes the ice to become thinner, and if thicher ice traps more warm water due to the insulative properties of thick ice, then wouldn’t thickening the ice in turn trap more warm water beneth the ice causing th eice to grow thinner? Not to mention that is Salt Water they would be pumping on top of fresh water ice. The last I checked, the salt would leach out of the ice as the water freezes causing a layer of salt to remain on the surface. Doesn’t salting ice cause it to melt faster?

This is the banal “albedo” argument, which takes one parameter out of context and then refuses to look at observations to see whether ignoring everything else in the Arctic climate system makes sense as a method of prediction.
If less ice meant more net heating leading to more ice melting we would be in a positive feedback situation.
The OGM ice minima of 2007 and 2012 would have been followed by even faster melting the next year and very rapidly accelerating ice loss. This is what happens under positive feedback.
So what does the data tell us? What happened after the OGM ice melting of 2007? Was 2008 even lower and worse again in 2009 ? NO THERE WAS A REBOUND.
What happened after the OMG-OMG-I-CANT-BREATHE ice minimum of 2012? Well Cryosat2 measured a massive 45% INCREASE in Arctic sea ice volume. That is about as solid a observational falsification of the supposedly dominant positive feedback provided by ice albedo.

While the albedo principal is correct , clearly it is over-ridden by stronger negative feedbacks and is in reality insignificant. The 2016 Sept min was the same as 2007 and notably more than 2012. There is not way that is consistent with the proposition that albedo is a major factor.
These Toy-town political activist pseudo-scientists, like Steven Desch, need to go back the observational data and check their science before making total fools of themselves and having the hubris to present themselves as an authority of what policy is required.Gentlemen, climate is complicated. Stop trying to reduce it to a single variable equation.
In 2013 I noted the presence of a circa 5y cycle in arctic sea ice data. 2012-2007=5 2012+5=2017 . This year will be to next trough in the cycle. Though I doubt it will be as low as 2012.
2018 will see a notable increase in arctic sea ice cover.

“Ice is a good insulator, says Steven Desch, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe. That’s why moons such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, among others, may be able to maintain liquid oceans beneath their thick icy surfaces.”
Steven Desch is an idiot. These moons are heated by tidal flexing as they orbit giant gas planets. That’s how they maintain liquid oceans beneath their icy surfaces:http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/high-tide-on-europa/
One would think a ‘planetary scientist’ at Arizona State University should know that.

“The thicker the ice, the more heat gets trapped [in the ocean]….”
So, shouldn’t that cause the ocean to heat up catastrophically and boil us all? Isn’t the companion argument, “the ‘thicker’ (so to speak) the CO2, the more heat gets trapped [in the atmosphere]”?

Salt water requires colder temps to freeze, so bring billions of bottles of Ozarka and pour that on the ice, where it will freeze more easily. And you can buy 166 billion gallons, in 2.6 trillion pint bottles, at WalMart for $500B. And we could cure the unemployment problem by hiring the homeless to open and pour out all those bottles!

Let me see if I get this. Ice currently forms from the bottom up, and melts from the top down. It’s melting faster than it’s freezing, so if we pump water from underneath (which has more latent energy than the ice on top), it will then magically freeze despite the insolation which is causing the top layer to melt? Hmm….

Yes the technique has been used to make thick ice islands as working platforms in the Beaufort Sea.
“The use of ice as a support material for offshore oil and gas exploration began in 1973 at the Hecla exploration well in the Canadian High Arctic. The floating drilling pad used artificial thickening of the natural ice sheet by flooding with seawater. Build-up rates where dictated by the time required to freeze thin layers of water, which were repeatedly added to the frozen core. Close to 40 floating ice pads were successfully used between 1973 and 1986 in the Canadian High Arctic using flooding and freezing techniques in water depths up to 500m (Masterson et al 1987).”https://www.boem.gov/BOEM-Newsroom/Library/Publications/2005/c_core468.aspx

Russia’s Military Buildup in Arctic Has U.S. Watching Closely
by LUCY KAFANOV
ALAKURTTI BASE, Russia — An RPG whistles towards its target, exploding in a ball of fire just as a group of soldiers zip past on skis, bullets flying from their white rifles.
It was all part of a training exercise by Russia’s 80th Motor Rifle Arctic Brigade, which was established two years ago as part of the Kremlin’s bid for dominance in the Arctic.
The soldiers are trained to operate in some of the least hospitable climates in the world — where temperatures can drop to minus 40 — using tanks, military hardware and even reindeer sleds to get around in the frozen terrain.
NBC News was granted rare access to the Alakurtti base this week, along with several other foreign media organizations.
Located near the border with Finland in the Murmansk region, the Soviet-era base was refurbished and formally opened in 2015.
Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has launched the biggest military build-up in the Arctic since the fall of the USSR — bolstering its fleet of nuclear-fueled icebreakers, reopening abandoned Soviet military bases and building a string of new ones.
Russia isn’t alone in its Arctic ambition. The United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Iceland all lay claim to the area and its abundant natural resources.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the Arctic may contain 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its natural gas. And thanks to climate change, melting polar ice is expected to make drilling, mining and shipping even easier.
[…]

Okay but the USGS is throwing darts at the number for undiscovered oil resources in the Arctic. The best example of that was with shale oil in the Bakken and subsequent field re-development on land in the lower 48 states (under their noses). They are totally dependent on industry to tell them the real story with real data in successive revisions of awareness and reality. They use statistical resource models in between the updates. And like other modelers they are more interested in the getting the reports out than adequately informing the reader about the ranges of uncertainty in the estimates from one region to another or potential impacts of lurches in the rate of technical change and innovation.

richardscourtney asks: “Why would anybody want to stop the Arctic waters from becoming ice free?”
Knowing that ice, whether covering sea or land, hinders photosynthesis. And photosynthesis is necessary to extract Carbon from atmospheric Carbon Dioxide to form the base of the food chain for all Carbon Based Life Forms. I ask the analogous question:
Why would anyone want to hinder photosynthesis?

That is probably the worst argument for scamming tax money I’ve run into so far, and people in Congress are so dumb they will fall for it like hail dumping out of the sky.
What is this dork trying to do besides scam money out of us? Is he looking at trying to recreate the ‘Snowball Earth’ theory thingy and put it into action? Or is he just using a lot of buzzwords to convince the idiots in Congress to vote for another useless waste of money?
We could save the planet a lot faster if he and others like him could just, for a few weeks, stop talking. Think of the drop in CO2 levels that would happen, if they did that!

That’s right and warming that occurs as the result of less ice happens in the dark during the winter while summer time temperatures have remained unchanged for decades. Less ice let’s more ocean heat out.
Given that I favor more warming I am therefore in favor of this hair brained idea … if someone else pays for it that is!

They can’t even keep their little buoy weather monitoring stations and web cams working up there and this guy thinks buoyed windmills will remain functional? And those things move all over the place. Think of what your windmills are going to do.
I’ve gotta an idea professor Desch. You and your team will be responsible for the pilot project of one windmill and responsible for keeping it running year around for one full year. I wanna see you guys in a blizzard up on top of that thing trying to unfreeze the works and deice the blades. And while your at it you will have to install a capture cage at the induction for pump and replace every little critter that is caught and killed in it, one for one, just as coal fired power stations using salt water do. We don’t want any negative environmental impact from your scheme now do we?

They are not “idea people”. They don’t have a clue as is shown by their own words in the link you provided. They say there

This loss of sea ice represents one of the most severe positive feedbacks in the climate system, as sunlight that would otherwise be reflected by sea ice is absorbed by open ocean.

Well, that would be true if it were not the fact that the Arctic ocean emits more radiation than it absorbs.
Yes, open water does absorb more radiation than ice, but open water also radiates more energy than similar areas of ice-covered water. Over a year the total radiation from the surface is greater than the absorbtion into the surface because the region is dark for half the year and the angle of incidence is such that much solar radiation is reflected from the ocean whether or not it is ice covered.Remove ice from the Arctic ocean and over a year the ocean increases its radiation of energy to space by more than it increases its absorbtion of energy from the Sun. This is a NEGATIVE feedback in the climate system: it is NOT “one of the most severe positive feedbacks in the climate system”.
Richard

Well the tax payer, pays for them to come up with these “ideas” and might as well be paying for fairytales. You can get such “ideas” for free in cheap science fiction novels and it wouldn’t cost the tax payer a cent. Anyone can come up with an impractical cockamamie “idea” the practical application is impossible or financially unsustainable. And pie in the sky BS is BS no matter if the lead author has a PhD before their name or not.
And BTW they’re claim : “While a complete set of design specifications for a wind-powered pumping device and entire AIM system are beyond the scope of this paper…”
is not consistent with their other claim:
“Altogether, we estimate a cost of manufacture and deployment per device on the order of $50,000.”

The main point of debate is that the ocean is not perfectly smooth. Ripples/waves complicate the calculations and they vary in size and shape depending on wind conditions.
Of course when they get big enough you get white caps and the refractions caused by the bubbles complicate things even further.
Of course there are also those who believe that more open water increases evaporation which in turn increases clouds and as a result of clouds, more sunlight is reflected before it even gets to the water.
What a mess. It’s almost Cinco de Mayo, time for a beer.

Gunga,
“Before they spend much time and money on the buoy design, perhaps they should run an experiment to see just how long the water would continue to flow out of a nozzle in prolongs freezing conditions.”
My older brother Jim worked on the old Alaskan oil pipeline (in the early Anthropocene), and he told me he was once working right near the waters edge in truly cold weather, and he stumbled backward into the slushy water. He freaked out thinking he was gonna die and pretty much levitated back out . . apparently the outside of his clothing was cold enough to cause a thin layer of ice to form almost instantly on contact, such that it barely penetrated his clothes, and when he moved most of it shattered and fell off . .
Yeah, might want to run some tests ; )

And those things move all over the place. Think of what your windmills are going to do.

Not clearly addressed this in their paper…

3.2 Description of the Wind-Powered Pump and Its Implementation
We propose that a windpump mounted on a large buoy, could perform the function of capturing wind energy to pump seawater to the surface. While a complete set of design specifications for a wind-powered pumping device and entire AIM system are beyond the scope of this paper, the basic requirements of such a system can be identified. The basic components of such a device would include: a large buoy; a wind turbine and pump, drawing up seawater from below the ice; a tank for storing the water; and a delivery system that takes the water periodically flushed from the tank and distributes it over a large area. The goal is to raise enough water over the Arctic winter to cover an area approximately 0.1 km2 with approximately 1 m of ice. A system of such devices would have to be manufactured and delivered to the Arctic Ocean, probably repositioned each season, and would need to be maintained.
The engineering challenges of translating even such a common technology to the harsh environment of the Arctic are daunting. Gusts and lulls may increase wind speeds outside the operating range of the turbine, reducing efficiencies. Ambient temperatures are much colder than in other environments; it is a challenge to prevent the water inside the device (tank, delivery system) from freezing. Ice riming (on the outside of the device) is a common and serious problem in the Arctic that a wind turbine design must contend with. The design must also stabilize the buoy so that high winds do not tip over the wind turbine and buoy. Any final design for a buoy-mounted windpump would have to be developed in conjunction with engineers experienced in working in polar environments. That said, we note that many of the needed technologies already have been developed for other purposes. For example, several different wind turbine designs have been used successfully at South Pole station and in the Arctic ( https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/arctic-engineering/wind-turbines-whirling-arctic-regions 5 Oct. 2016), and many of the issues associated with storing and distributing liquid water during the Arctic winter are similar to the problems associated with supplying drinking water in high-arctic communities in the winter, such as the need for heated/insulated storage tanks and distribution systems (http://sciencenordic.com/arctic-town-has-running-water-just-four-months-year, 5 Oct. 2016).
The area of the Arctic Ocean is about 107 km2. If the wind-powered pumps are to be distributed across 10% of that area, this would necessitate about 10 million wind-powered pumps; if distributed across the entire Arctic, about 100 million would be needed. We assume implementation over 10 years, so deploying wind-pumps over the entire Arctic would require 10 million devices per year; deploying wind-pumps over 10% of the Arctic would require 1 million devices per year. Either choice involves a large number of wind-powered pumps to be manufactured, deployed, and maintained, and it is reasonable to ask whether such an endeavor is financially feasible or even logistically possible. To give a perspective on the scale of the enterprise, we estimate the total amount of steel needed, the total shipping capacity required to deliver them, and the total cost.
[…]

Before they spend much time and money on the buoy design, perhaps they should run an experiment to see just how long the water would continue to flow out of a nozzle in prolongs freezing conditions.
They could fill a swimming pool with salt water in, say, Minnesota or Canada. Put a pump in it spraying the water back into the pool and see just how long it takes for the ice build up to close off the nozzle.
PS Isn’t the actual ice in the Arctic relatively salt free? What’s going to happen to it after a boat load of salt water is pumped onto it?

Probably the same way that ski area operators keep theirs from icing up in, say, Vermont, during the winter. I’m not defending the deployment of such a solution, but as an engineering puzzle it’s likely very solvable with off-the-shelf technology.

“They can’t even keep their little buoy weather monitoring stations and web cams working up there and this guy thinks buoyed windmills will remain functional?”
What if a polar bear climbs up there and gets injured or killed!

Here is one from 1975,
Birds and Climatic Change
Kenneth Williamson
Published in 1975
Selected Excerpt:
HISTORICAL REVIEW
Between 1000 and 1300 average summer temperatures were about 1°C higher
than today, with the mean annual temperature higher by perhaps 4°C in a
largely ice-free Arctic. Eric the Red, a renowned world citizen of that time, has
been much maligned as the first progressive publicity man for giving Greenland
a false image in order to attract settlers; but in truth, the southwest of that vast
country was warmer and greener by far than at any time until the Fieldfares
Turdus pilaris arrived there in the mid-1930s. The sea-temperature of the Atlantic
was higher than it has been since, and there appears to have been none or very
little ice to hinder the Vikings’ communications between Iceland, Greenland,
Newfoundland and Labrador (Mowat 1965). Indeed Brooks (1926) considers that
the polar ice-cap may have disappeared entirely during the summer months, to
build anew each winter.http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00063657509476459
=======================================================
It is on page 2.

Ice.
Fantastic stuff in a Gin and Tonic with a nice slice of a tropical lemon.
A drink designed to remind us how lucky we are that we have abundant food, and the alternative is a sterile, cold material, that melts, and dilutes the alcohol, whilst maintaining the liquid level in the glass.
Amazing stuff really, but as far as I can gather, in the wild, it’s only useful for one thing. Boring holes, by boring people, determined to convince us they know what they are looking at.
Ice.

from wikipedia:
“The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the 18th century, and later spread to continental Europe, North America, and Japan, was based on the availability of coal to power steam engines.”
The 18th century was when the Little Ice Age ended. Proof positive that Britain and the steam engine saved the world from the next ice age. Wasn’t another WATT involved at that time as well?

From March 1975 to May 2017, Science News has gone from “the Ice Age cometh” to “Arctic sea ice… accelerating to oblivion”… Ohhhhhh Noooooooo!!!
Which is why after reading it for over sixty years, I stopped several years ago.

The Swedish meteorogical office SMHI has don a reconsruction of the ice cover in the Baltic sea, since 1660.
Abstract
“The annual maximum ice cover Cmax and ice extent Amax in the Baltic Sea are important indicators of regional winter climate in northern Europe. Apart from modern-day operational ice charts, proxy data such as coastal observations, mean winter air temperature and ice break-up dates have been used to reconstruct Cmax and Amax back to 1660.
Consolidated time series were constructed by giving the proxy time series different weights. These weights were calculated as inversely proportional to the mean square errors of the time series during the calibration period 1961–1990.
The consolidated time series indicate large interannual variability as well as interdecadal variability. In spite of the recent mild winters in the Baltic Sea region, the large interannual variabilities of Cmax Amax make the calculated trends over moving 30-year windows mostly insignificant in a statistical sense.”
Nothing here, move on, please.

You know, they used to harvest ice from Walden Pond in Concord, MA and ship it all over the world. Maybe we should start up the ice harvesting business infrastructure again and ship it all up to Santa. We owe him that much.

What, pray tell, is the great benefit of having Arctic ice caps anyway? The seals can just haul out on land, and so forth. What was the sea ice level during the Medieval Warm, and what dread effects did that have?

50,000 for manufacture shipping and installion of a bouy to support a windmill and survive weather and crushing ice- BS !!! Oh, and what CO2 hasn’t accomplished, this ignorant scheme could if it had the miracle of working,:kill off seals, polar bears,… Now I think his work on other planet’s is totally suspect. Note: no engineers were disturbed during the making of this fantasy.

Windmills and pumps operating at -90C. Yep, can’t see anything wrong with that plan.
[Usually no colder than -35 to -40C up around 80 north latitude. It is the high elevations on top of the Antarctic ice cap that can get that cold. Sometimes. .mod]

Please be advised that building and installing $500 bilion worth of windmills would be very profitable for certain companies, and thus would be a really really good thing for America and the world. How do we send more funding to this guy?
sincerely,
Warren Buffet, Vestas, Siemens and General Electric

I would think that this attempt to change a large geographic area’s albedo would be more easilly done by covering rooftops with mirrored sheets of aluminum alloy and reflecting the rays back to space in a far more efficient manner than ice could ever do, Those alloy sheets would also have the energy saving benefit of requiring far less energy to run the A/C in the summer. We don’t know what the benefit of those ice making windmills will be – perhaps none at all if not really needed, whereas the benefits of reflective roofs would be there , irregardless.

I’ve facetiously claimed that if we painted all roofs and all cars in our big cities white, we could eliminate global warming.
More sunlight reflected equals cooler air temperatures.
Less sunlight absorbed by buildings and cars means less energy being discharged from AC units equals cooler air temperatures.
These cooler air temperatures mean AC’s don’t have to work as hard, equaling cooler air temperatures.
And since most of the ground based thermometers are located in and around cities …

“Since we know that the current Arctic sea ice extent is much larger than that of most of the Holocene”
Well in the early holocene there was very little ice at all – but! there were very special conditions then, due to the stage of the Milankovitch cycle the earth was then in – the orbital orientation was such that there was much, much more insolation falling onto the arctic during the arctic summer.
Once we’d moved out of that part of the cycle, the ‘ground’ conditions were very different -so there is no comparison between now or even the last 2,000 years and the earlier part of the holocene.
If you look at ‘recent’ sea ice history, certainly we are at the lowest extent since 1850 (according to the recent collation of all available records since that date – and I do mean all)
We are far lower than the low in the last ‘cycle’ around 1943
And the trend is still lower… this winter saw record low extents thru the winter and thin, broken ice is now spread out, being exported and set to go in yet another record melt season

Griff,
you post this crap again,as you were answered at another blog on this. You are indeed a dishonest person and stupid too, because as YOU admit that it was, I quote: “Well in the early holocene there was very little ice at all…” ,yet you seem to understand that such conditions didn’t cause any visible ecological or biological disaster.
Meanwhile here is that chart AGAIN you ignored yesterday,where it shows that currently, it is well above the average for the entire interglacial.:http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Arctic-Sea-Ice-Holocene-Stein-17-768×496.jpg

I’m posting the science Tommy…
For example this:http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/bradley2003x.pdf
“On the very longest, multi-millennial time-scales, the main factors affecting Holocene climate change are related to orbital forcing (changes in obliquity, precession and eccentricity). These changes involved virtually no change in overall global insolation receipts (over the course of each year) but signiﬁcant re-distribution of energy, both seasonally and latitudinally.”
“In the Early Holocene, precessional changes led to perihelion at the time of the northern hemisphere summer solstice (today it is closer to the winter solstice). This resulted in higher summer insolation in the Early Holocene at all latitudes of the northern hemisphere (ranging from ∼40°W/m2 higher than today at 60°N to 25°W/m2 higher at the Equator). Thus, July insolation (radiation at the top, or outside, the atmosphere) has slowly decreased over the last 12,000 years”
Insolation in the arctic summer was massively greater than now, thus melting the ice.
We don’t have the same orbital forcing now -yet we do have declining ice levels.
You can’t compare then and now without acknowledging there was a particular influence then we don’t have now

In the NH, the waters continue to warm into September which is when they are the warmest even though the maximum energy from the Sun was received way back in June at the summer solstice. But even though there is less energy received each day forward from then on, the net accumulation into the NH is still positive until September so the waters keep warming till then. So we are in the August of the interglacial. Earth will continue to warm, albeit less and less as we move forward until such time that the Milankovitch cycles create conditions to produce a net loss of energy received. So just as the waters warm into September, one should expect the conditions on Earth to continue warming until the very end of the interglacial.
Or more simply, it is always gets warmer until it starts to get cooler.

If you look at ‘recent’ sea ice history, certainly we are at the lowest extent since 1850 (according to the recent collation of all available records since that date – and I do mean all)
____
In 1850, earth was starting to emerge from the Little Ice Age. How could sea ice be low at the end of this period of extremely low temperatures? I suspect a cut and paste job from some publication that specializes in fools and the gullible.

The thicker the ice, the more heat gets trapped
===========
so, strange as it might seem, the solution to making more ice is to have less ice. no windmills required, as the ice melts it becomes easier to make ice, keeping the whole thing in balance. negative feedback in action.

The problem is, (from the warmist perspective), loss of sea ice is a SYMPTOM of a warming world. It doesnt cause warming, in fact its very presense tends to inhibit the loss of heat. So taking an action to treat this symptom can only make matters worse (by trapping even more heat).
Ironically, a rational true believer (if there is such a person) would advocate the artificial destruction of sea ice. To let the extra heat out you see.
This whole discussion is crazy talk nonetheless.

David Middleton.
None of my criticisms were aimed at you. It’s just that this arctic windmill pumping idea ranks right up there with solar panel roads in my book. And the problem is that some people believe this kind of thing is practical because some guy with a PhD says so.
There is another problem I see with these kinds of articles. Though they provide plenty of material for you guys here at WUWT and on some other blogs and we can laugh at them as so many knowledgeable posters and authors here tear them apart I believe they cause a kind of cumulative damage.
Being constantly bombarded by this kind of stuff makes it easy to for people to become rather jaundiced skeptics and so when the occasional feasible idea that may actually be of some benefit for the people or their environment in general comes along a tendency can develop to be overly skeptical.
During WW II the great engineer Barnes Wallis ran up against this very kind of thing in the halls of British war bureaucracy trying to get his dam buster project and later his huge bombs approved for development and production. The officers in the bureaucracy had been so inundated with silly ideas for weapons and suggestions that they had become overly skeptical.

RAH, TV producers, novelists, engineers… get flooded with ‘wonderful’ ideas from viewers, readers and interested laity. It tends not to prove an inspiring resource for ideas. Engineers have a kindly affection for their professors of science who taught them and don’t tend to poke fun when they take an excursion into engineering, which they are fascinated with. The oxymoron ‘rocket scientist’ (er… that would be ‘engineer’), born at the start of the space programs, arose from this fascination with the work of engineers. Everyone wanted a piece of this wonderful discipline. Early dish or laundry soap ads of the period, even said their soap had been engineered to do it’s wonders on your dishes and clothes (this actually is a bit more true than the fabled rocket science).
In Canada’s Dept of Nat Resources many years ago, it was decided that government scientists should have more of an economic basis for their research. A committee was duly constituted. The geological survey flooded the mineral resources/mining agencies with loads of naive stuff (eg: a geologist whose specialty was the petrology and structure of granite pointed out that granite had abundant potash that might be exploited. That the K was in insoluble silicates like feldspar and mica didn’t phase him). Not too long afterwards, the committee was dissolved because of the flood of nonsense that had to be replied to.
I’m a geologist and engineer and had argued against such a committee. Note, however, that engineer Wallis, a practical man by training, did succeed in selling his idea to the war department. This icing up the Arctic would probably kill off seals by filling in their holes and kill off polar bears, etc. all this to prevent a problem that hasn’t even been established. The Arctic variability goes well beyond anything we are seeing today and models for CAGW theory are already running 300% to warm. Do nothing (please!!). A plea from an engineer and scientist.

Gary Pearse
If Sir Wallace had not been so stubborn in pounding on doors and keeping at them none of it would have ever happened. He met that resistance despite the fact that he was the lead engineer that had developed the geodetic (geodesic) air frame for the Wellington bomber that was still in front line service with bomber command when he was working on getting the dams project off the ground. It got so silly that after his idea was first officially rejected he wrote an open paper on how the dams bomb would work. He got a visit from British counter intelligence asking why he was publishing such highly classified stuff so Wallace told them he had been told officially that it was rejected as unworkable and asked how could it be classified or sensitive under those circumstances?

The problem is, (from the warmist perspective), loss of sea ice is a SYMPTOM of a warming world. It doesnt cause warming, in fact its very presense tends to inhibit the loss of heat. So taking an action to treat this symptom can only make matters worse (by trapping even more heat).
Ironically, a rational true believer (if there is such a person) would advocate the artificial destruction of sea ice. To let the extra heat out you see.
This whole discussion is crazy talk nonetheless.

I used to daydream about a “device” which could be used to quickly call the warmist’s bluff. This magical device would automatically regulate the entire planet’s atmospheric CO2 concentration to 250 ppm, just like the warmists claim they want. Once activated, the device cannot be altered.
I always assumed that when confronted with a choice of giving them what they wanted, they would quickly come to their senses and admit to their foolishness. Today, however, I see a different breed, the true believers, and realize they would sacrifice us all in the name of global warming, without batting an eye.
These are scary people.

They estimate that it would cost $500 billion to cover 10% of the Arctic Ocean with ice-making buoys…

To make a difference, they should cover the entire Arctic Ocean, with a price tag of $5 trillion. Still a pittance compared to projected costs of climate change mitigation.
But wait. Pumping large amount of salt water on the upper surface of ice floes is the best way to melt them completely.
Unfortunately there is a physical phenomenon called brine exclusion. It means when salt water freezes, the remaining fluid is enriched in salt, because ice crystals do not like it. If it happens on top, that very salty liquid is forced to trickle down to the ocean through the ice floe, making a gazillion of channels along the way and leaving it really rotten, subject to melting during the next summer.
Never mind.

Sea ice is mainly fresh water if it is thick enough, so heck of a way to make fresh water out of salt water using the cold of winter. Would work anywhere it is cold enough to freeze salt water. I read somewhere that some cities freeze water in winter, and use that melting ice water for summer air conditioning in downtown office towers.
An interesting ‘thought’ article about possibly providing a solution…if there was a problem with diminishing arctic ice levels. But just think of all the bats that would be killed with 1 million of these bird choppers.

They did no experiment whatsoever, they only propose to do so. It’s modeling all the way down as usual.Arctic ice management“Questions about the feasibility of the device and its local effects are probably best solved by building a prototype and experimenting with it in the field.”

Berényi Péter May 4, 2017 at 6:28 am
They did no experiment whatsoever, they only propose to do so. It’s modeling all the way down as usual.
Wrong, it’s been done multiple times before:
“Close to 40 floating ice pads were successfully used between 1973 and 1986 in the Canadian High Arctic using flooding and freezing techniques in water depths up to 500m (Masterson et al 1987).”

I am somewhat confused. I have always thought sea ice freezes from above and melts from below. (If I am wrong about this I hope someone will take a few minutes and teach me. I don’t want to remain stupid.)
Cold winter air chills first sea water and as ice forms chills the ice so that ice in contact with sea water causes the sea water to freeze adding to the thickness of the ice. Or to put it another way — during winter when sea ice is forming — sea ice is always colder than the sea water.
During summer the sea ice gains temperature from the air and is no longer able to freeze the sea water around it. Instead the sea water begins to melt the ice from below. The sea ice melts from the bottom up.
Have i misunderstood how sea ice forms and dissolves? Its what i have always thought.
If what i have said is true it seems pumping up water from just below the ice to let it freeze on the ice surface only causes lower warmer water to replace what is removed — probably, at a certain ice thickness, causing the ice to begin to melt from below. (Not to mention that this water poured on top of the ice would lower ice temperature slowing the chilling process of the sea water below.) Perhaps, at the beginning, this method might cause ice to thicken quicker but I can’t see how it would increase total thickness past a certain maximum.
So if all sea water below the ice maintained the same low temperature all the time we would have a perfect relationship between air temperature and sea ice thickness.
What seems to screw this up are ocean currents. Warm water from the south flows to the north and it seems the majority of it can go one way or another. If it heads into the arctic you are going to get thinner sea ice, that warmer water being harder to freeze. (And quicker melting of sea ice in the summer.) Now that is a very old idea.
So there is a relationship between ice thickness and air and water temperatures. (I suspect the arctic air and arctic water temperatures vary independently of each other.) Cold air and cold water produce the most ice. Warmer air and warmer water produce the least ice.
Anyway that is what i have always believed.
Eugene WR Gallun

On deeper inspection most problems are more complicated than simple models suggest. The growth of ice is a classic problem (Stefan problem) in heat transfer–the result is an ice thickness that grows with square-root of time. However, the Stefan problem does not account for the issue of a freezing temperature that changes according to the mechanism which Berényi Péter lays out in his post above. And the melting of ice is far more complex than just drawing heat from a warmer body into the ice. Pools of water appear on the ice surface and descend through fissures and fractures. The Stefan problem does not account for the resulting convective heat transfer during melting.
That most problems are more complex than simple models suggest doesn’t often bother scientists who are after a general understanding of a problem. Yet when the issue becomes an engineering problem of trying to make some scheme work in a practical sense, then the complications do become important. This silly scheme is an engineering problem–one looking to solve a problem that may not be a problem at all.

One of the key problems with this scheme is that freezing salt water ‘squeezes’ the salt out the bottom of the new ice that is created on top of the fresh water ice that is already frozen. Then that concentrated salt brine sandwiched between the two ice layers would rapidly melt the original fresh water ice below it. Might make this project self defeating. More thought is required on this project before implementation.
But it is a interesting thought experiment, and as David M. says, we shouldn’t be too fast to just outright ridicule everything we think is stupid or funny. For every 100 questionable thought experiments, there will be 1 that is a hit and solves problems or makes money. Keep ’em coming….next?

It’s not possible to be “too fast to just outright ridicule everything we think is stupid or funny.” I wish I could be even faster at ridiculing things that I think are stupid and/or funny.
When it comes to these climate geoengineering schemes, I don’t think there are any hits that will solve any problems. The problem is that they all involve cooling the Earth. I have no doubt that most of these schemes would cool the Earth… I just don’t think the cooling can be controlled once initiated.

I see I mistakenly stated this was your comment but was actually RAH May 3, 2017 at 8:46 am. My mistake.
I think your reply point below his was not ‘to cry wolf’ at every lame idea, since some ideas may have merit, or can be built upon to be successful. For the record, I am also against any schemes to make the planet any colder. We already in an ice age the last 1.5 years, and only in a temporary interglacial that will undoubtably end fairly soon in the scheme of things.

I would also suggest the following paper, which I think is excellent: The dynamic Arctic , Martin Jakobssona, , , Ólafur Ingólfssonb, c, Antony J. Longd, Robert F. Spielhagene. Here is one excerpt:

Consequently, ice sheet advances and retreats are all too often interpreted as evidence for climate events, disregarding the possibility that they may reflect changes in ice dynamics, e.g., rapid changes in grounding-line position in response to sea-level oscillations.

Also should add — if Europa and Enceladus have liquid below their ice then their cores must be generating heat. How this core heat is generated might not be the same way Earth’s core heat is generated.
Eugene WR Gallun

You want me to do what?
Pump near freezing water on a below freezing windy day in the open ocean near ice flows so you can pump water with a metal windmill onto the ice.
The first set of conditions produces frazzle ice particles in the water which will glob onto to the metal parts of the pump and clog it up with ice.

Retired Kit P
Quite obviously you need an auxillary heating system to heat the water enough so that does not happen. That can be supplied by solar panels. Then everything is hunky dory.
Eugene WR Gallun

Let me get this straight. One group of scientist whacko’s says that arctic is losing sea ice and that is bad. They point to the loss of multi-year sea ice and scream bloody murder. Another group of scientist whacko’s says that sea ice doesn’t let heat from the water escape to the atmosphere. They say that too thick of sea ice(multi-year) is bad because it slows down the formation of sea ice.
And they wonder why sceptics don’t believe them.

” McKay et al., 2008 demonstrated that the modern Arctic sea ice cover is anomalously high”. As Dr McKay points out- We’re possibly starting the real fall into the next glaciation. The timing is right. Almost all the ice core data points to a long, slow, sporadic fall from the maximum temperature down to the gradual extension of the ice cover over ~100,000 years.

I don’t know what the problem is. If it gets too warm we can just have everyone open their refrigerator and freezer doors for several hours a day, and open the doors to the outside to cool things down. Problem solved! Where’s my grant money?

Has this genius figured out yet that:
1) sea ice is made up fresh water with very little entrained saline water?
2) water pumped from beneath the ice will be saline, in fact, it will be concentrated saline compared to normal sea water?
3) saline water pumped onto the sea ice surface is likely to accelerate ice melting at much lower temperatures then currently?
4) ignoring the actual physics (as compared to climate science physics), does he realize that biological organisms actually live on the fresh water ice and might be adversely impacted by salty ice?

And seals’ holes in the ice would be filled in and polar bears would have nothing to eat. Plus as astute commenters point out, you’d be stupidly pumping salt enriched sea water on top of freshwater ice! I can’t but be disgusted that a PhD astronomer (what goes for a physicist these days! ) was graduated that thinks like this! He even has the smarmy hubris to offer HIS ‘engineering’ calculations of costs: 50,000 for each buoy all-in including delivery and installation to hold up a windmill in that environment and against the crushing and ridging of ice. A couple of million wouldn’t do it! Where TF are the engineers in his university? This should be a huge embarrassment to the university. This guy’s planetary work should be reviewed if he is this stupid.

Seriously? Spending $500 Billion on this may be premature if it turns out less polar sea ice is not the problem they say it will be. Or if ocean currents turn south and it gets cooler water at the north pole, the ice is just going to freeze up again and probably faster than it melted. Like all in one winter if it stays colder than melting the following 2-3 seasons and then we have multi year ice already.
If we had $500 Billion to spend on climate mitigation measures, I would spend it on asteroid/comet identification measures and deflection mitigation. That will be our greatest contribution humankind can offer, since one large bolide collision with earth will really make our day. (colder)

Couldn’t this actually make the problem worse if implemented? The sea ice has a lower salinity than the surrounding water, and the water close to the bottom of the ice (if the hypothesis of how ice freezes stated above is correct) should be slightly more saline than the rest of the ocean. Pump this salty water on top of the sea ice and the greater salinity introduced could actually cause the ice to melt faster, because it will start melting at lower temperatures and then the run off would cause the natural ice to melt faster as well.
Also probably the quickest way to add ice would be to use ski slope snow makers.

“Suck up near-freezing water from under the ice and pump it directly onto the ice’s surface during the long polar winter.”
Actually this has been done for several decades. Ice Islands have been constructed in the Beaufort Sea for winter drilling. They simply pump seawater onto the ice until the ice finally rest on the bottom. Then they move a rig out and drill during the winter and move the rig off the ice before breakup.

Wouldn’t it be better to grab the 34 degree water from just below the ice and bring it up to an exposed heat exchanger and then return back at 32 degrees so it could freeze faster? Does he even know that icebergs and sea ice have no salt in them?

For those who are interested in the daily totals of direct solar radiation energy (theoretically) deposited on the southern edge of the Arctic sea ice over the course of a year, this table is provided.

Several columns are self-obvious.
TOA radiation levels are from Svalgaard;s latest SORCE data.
Arctic sea ice albedo is from Perovich and Judith Curry’s SHEBA ice station reports.
Latitude is calculated for the southern edge of the sea ice 3 times a month, using the 1979-1990 average sea ice area from Cryosphere, Univ of Illinois.
Direct radiation levels are calculated using a 0.75 atmosphere attentuation factor, based on the attenuation through the Kasten-Young Air Mass calculated for sun’s Solar Elevation Angle at each hour of the day, then totaled for the 24 hours.
The last column is the Daily Total of DIFFERENCE between the solar energy absorbed in water at each hour, minus the solar energy absorbed by the sea ice at that same hour of the day and day of year. (Sea ice albedo gets substantially darker through the year, so more energy is absorbed as the summer gets longer.)
[Corrected formatting. .mod]

Q:(from scruffy sceptic) Why do we need to do this ?
A: (from distinguished professor); To provide stable ice platforms so that Polar bears can catch seals after emerging from hibernation.
Q : How do they catch seals?
A: They wait for seals to come out on the ice and then ambush them
Q: How likely is it that a seal will approach an ice floe throbbing with wind turbines and sucking up gallons/sec of water and spraying it all around ?
A: We believe that they will just love it and of course the noise will mask the sound of the bear’s stealthy approach . Win all round really , well except for the seal , and the US taxpayer and the US Navy men and women who go out to do the maintenance on 50 million devices in the middle of winter in a howling gale.

Arctic sea ice will “recover” all by itself. It has gone through many cycles much warmer than now.
This year’s unusually slow melt continues. Starting from a lower maximum, thanks to the El Nino, sea ice extent is now higher than at this time in 2015 and 2016.http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
Having slightly more open water this winter meant that more heat was lost from the Arctic Ocean and adjacent seas than normal. The cooler water is retarding the thaw.

You’ve got to hand it to them – they never pass up an opportunity for exploitation, in order to further their agenda.
Windmills in the Arctic. Boy, I ‘d love to be the guy chopping the ice of those things in mid-February.

Hey!
Here’s an idea. Why not ship all the sawdust from make making those wood pellets being shipped to the UK (?) and mix it in with the salt water being pumped to make Pycrete!
It takes longer to melt than regular ice.

Great idea. Just don’t do it with drama this time…..https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete
“Another tale is that at the Quebec Conference of 1943 Mountbatten brought a block of pykrete along to demonstrate its potential to the entourage of admirals and generals who had come along with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mountbatten entered the project meeting with two blocks and placed them on the ground. One was a normal ice block and the other was pykrete. He then drew his service pistol and shot at the first block. It shattered and splintered. Next, he fired at the pykrete to give an idea of the resistance of that kind of ice to projectiles. The bullet ricocheted off the block, grazing the trouser leg of Admiral Ernest King and ending up in the wall. According to Perutz’s own account, however, the incident of a ricochetting bullet hitting an Admiral actually happened much earlier in London and the gun was fired by someone on the project—not Mountbatten.[8]”

@Eugene
“Quite obviously you need an auxillary heating system to heat the water enough so that does not happen. ”
Actually that is what the utility thought. Saved them millions, used it as a bullet point on my resume. Showed them how to solve the problem for free. Somethings are easy on dry land and insane in the arctic.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/arctic-sea-ice-scraping-bottom-of-barrel-21418
Has a diagram showing how little multi year ice is left….
“Ice older than five years in age now only comprises 5 percent of the Arctic’s ice pack. It accounted for 30 percent of all Arctic sea ice in 1984, …..
Young ice has sprung up in its place and now accounts for nearly 70 percent of all Arctic ice, up from just 35 percent just three decades ago.”

Stranne et al., 2013 demonstrated that the modern day Arctic sea ice extent is more comparable to that of the last Pleistocene glacial stage than to that of the Holocene Climatic Optimum (9,000-5,000 years before present).
This model referred to in the OP shows a mean ice thickness for the present about 3m whereas measurements give somewhere between 1-1.5 m, comparable with the Holocene Climate Optimum values they show. Their calculations were based on the preindustrial conditions not present-day.

How often does the temperature get above freezing in the Arctic ?? I thought they melted from below…

It’s a good question, and the answers in the actual papers describing the two circumstances are themselves somewhat confusing. Best general rule is: Arctic sea ice melts from the top down (stagnant, shallow melt water ponds on the top of the floating sea ice, with air temperatures just above freezing at 3-4 degrees C during the short summer weeks. Below, the sea water is “not freezing” (not accumulating) rather than “actively and rapidly melting” with water temperatures between 2 and 4 deg C. Antarctic sea ice is above much water waters (4-5 deg C) and those waters are more active (circulating and flowing faster underneath each year’s sea ice). Around the Antarctic, almost all of the sea ice refreezes each year (very little is second and third year “fast ice” near the shores) and 100% of the sea ice far from the shores is first year ice.
The Antarctic sea ice melts from below, there are almost no stagnant melt water ponds on top of the sea ice, and so fresh snow accumulates on top very often through the whole year. As a result, the Antarctic sea ice has a higher albedo (cleaner, fresh snow instead of dirty polluted snow and dust and melt ponds) over the entire year. 0.83 on average, only going down slightly to 0.75 in December – January – Feb.

RACookPE1978 May 4, 2017 at 7:15 am
The Antarctic sea ice melts from below, there are almost no stagnant melt water ponds on top of the sea ice, and so fresh snow accumulates on top very often through the whole year.
Also according to NSIDC:
“Antarctic sea ice tends to be covered by thicker snow, which may accumulate to the point that the weight of snow pushes the ice below sea level, causing the snow to become flooded by salty ocean waters.”

It would be my privilege to manage the first $1 billion feasibility study to make this amazing vision a reality. And of course there will need to be at least 4 more studies to bring this amazing new technology into the field test stage. And each stage of this vital study will of course require at least 2x the funding of the previous stage. /sarc

There is a lot of information on ice in the Manual of Ice (MANICE) put out by the Canadian Ice Service. It will answer a lot of your questions.
It even describes what a lot of people make fun of and that is what is called Rotten Ice. It is an actual term for ice when it is melting.
Rotten Ice: Ice which has become honeycombed and is in an advanced state of disintegration.https://www.ec.gc.ca/glaces-ice/default.asp?lang=En&n=2CE448E2-1

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